Real Legends and heroes through history

[Off Topic]

Originally Posted by Charles

This sentence is confusing (two "they"s).

Who stopped more people being sent? So the Nazis stopped sending Jews to concentration camps because the Jews didn't want to be deported?

I believe he meant, "The people initially thought Jews were being relocated and Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler stopped more people being sent."

[jtur88]

Originally Posted by LondonUSA

I think people had an idea of what was going (as you said it seems hard not to) but in a way i don't think they wanted to believe it. Even the leaders of the countries the Germans were taking the Jews from actually did not know what was happening and when Vrba told some leaders what was actually happening, they themselves did not believe it initially. This is all based on two documentaries i have seen so i am putting faith into their accuracy.

This is a phenomenon that is often exaggerated by historians. One often reads in historical accounts that a certain fact "was known", but that doesn't always indicate that that knowledge was sufficiently widespread or credible to have any influence on the unfolding of events. And a great deal of what was "known" was simply false (or grotesquely outdated, when facts traveled at caravan speed), and history unfolded as if it were true.

When the Dale Gribble school of history contends that the Swiss "knew" what the nazis were doing, that could be based on unverifiable reports (such as from Vrba) that they had been aware of, but with insufficient authentication to affect national policy. At what point was it "known" that there were no WMDs in Iraq?

[Phil306]

The Vrba-Wexler report was actually dismissed, not only by the allies, but Jewish Councils all over Europe as "impossible to believe." Toward the end of the war, when the allies started to believe what was occurring, all of the death camps, save Birkenau, had already been destroyed. Furthermore, Churchill refused to bomb the trail lines to Birkenau, which would have saved MANY MORE lives.

Anti-semitism was alive and well all over Europe, including the allies and The United States. It still is.

[PatDJohns]

The US was anti-semetic but not like Europe, not even close. Since the US was so young, Jews were seen as part of the fabric of the nation, from the start. Jews were also allowed alot more religious freedom in the US. Why do you think so many millions came here?

And while the average citizen in non-Nazi occupied nations may not have known about the Holocaust, the leaders of the Allies definately did. There is quite a bit of historical evidence that Churchill, FDR, and Stalin were all well aware of the existence of the concentration camps and what their nature was but may have not had the specific details.